The Way To A Man's Heart
by skyspireskit3
Summary: Some Tiana/Facilier, for those who want it.


Happy holidays, y'all.

Disclaimer: Not mine.

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In the draped darkness of Dr. Facilier's Emporium, Tiana sits with her back against the wall. She feels the chill reflected off of the polished wooden floor, the scratch of the luxurious rug. A ribbon of blood drying on her thigh like the remnant of a sacrifice.

Throughout the room, bottles reflect eldritch light from unseen sources, like eyes watching from a thicket. Nightmares glow in jars. Beasts, or worse, chitter and rustle unseen in the gloom. Things from beyond this world. She shudders but says slyly aloud, "Why, I'm disappointed, Mr. Shadowman. No bones, no heads of other virgins who came before me?"

She's no flame-bitten moth. She'd just wanted to get it over with, just get her body to shut up and let her alone. Stirrings he'd awakened her in treacherous flesh. The thought of him seducing her made her recoil, so she'd jumped the threshold first, ending it on her own terms. He'd laughed. Step on in, of your own will.

Devoid of illusions, the tailored threads that sculpt his sleek silhouette, his body is a ruin. Whipcord muscle ropes him, but his ribs jut so sharply she could strum a funeral dirge on them; his skin is etched with bizarre scars and tattoos of demons and skulls that seemed to come voraciously alive in the moonlight; his spine is twisted, inked and carved into a column of totem faces, screaming soundlessly beneath her fingers with every flex of his back. Somehow beautiful in its devastation. He'd roamed her like a delicately-mannered jackal, nibbling to find the tender places. His gentleness had been frightening. Everything, the mouths in his warped bones, the choirs of painted jaws on his flesh, the scrape of his teeth, set to devour her until not a scrap remained. Afterward, as she'd lain panting under him, the tempest of orgasm ebbing and the pieces of her vision slowly drifting back together, he'd smiled against her sweat-glossed neck, "Hope I didn't scare you."

She touches the red stain, the evidence of her loss.

Like a vampire's bite, she'd barely felt it.

Crickets carol outside the windows. It's a rare day of the week when a gap yawns between her shifts; she doesn't need to go in for work for several hours. The door isn't locked. But she can't go home to her mother with the blood fresh on her thighs.

An earthy man, all sweet eyes and bribing flowers and guileless want, would just get buried under the workload she carries, trampled from memory in her daily rush. This is what she needs, she realizes. Something that will satisfy and then dissolve back into the shade, leaving her future safe and underailed.

She gets up.

There isn't much that's edible in Facilier's home (_Explains a lot,_ Tiana thinks, thinking again of his knifehandle ribs) but she finds enough to make a decent breakfast. Soon, she's lost in the motions, polishing away the stress.

The floorboards creak on her way up the stairs, to where Dr. Facilier still lies snarled in the purple satin of his bed. A light sleeper, he had heard her leave, but he hadn't expected her to come back up. He'd been groggily examining the bruise of her virgin blood on his sheets, scrolling through a mental list of spells he could perform with it, when the scent of hot food, sweet spices and ripe fruit, assaults his nose and wrings his empty stomach. He props himself up on an elbow to see Tiana slipping in, a laden tray in her hands.

His gaze flames with approval even as he chuckles, "Now, what would your momma say?"

She smiles without her eyes. "She'd say that the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Or," settling beside him, she presses a finger between his shoulder blades, "if the situation calls for it, his back."

"Mm-hm." A slice of _Pain Perdu_ levitates from the plate, and her reality tilts at the sight of his long shadow, moving independently of its master, lifting it to dangle over him.

Facilier tips his head to catch it, teeth flashing. "Lucky for you I consider myself a gentleman."


End file.
